Stories of
American Heroes -
Brought to you from the "Home of Heroes" - Pueblo, Colorado

Pacific
Stars and StripesFive Star Edition

Vol.
19, No. 304

Friday, Nov. 1,
1963

3 Aides Seized in Vietnam
Battle

Saigon
(AP)Communist guerrillas smashed a Republic of
Vietnam task force after disrupting its radio communication
Tuesday, and probably captured all three U.S. Army advisers with
the 120-man Saigon outfit.

The three
Americans listed as missing and believed captured were two
officers and an enlisted medic. Stragglers returning from
the rout said both officers had been wounded early in the
fight--one in the head and the other in the leg.

A second
government force of about 200 men operating only a few thousand
yards from the main fight, learned of the disaster too late to
help. U.S. authorities said the communist radio jammers
had knocked out both the main channel and the alternate channel
on all local military radios.

"Rocky"

"They
could not break him....

....They
couldn't even bend him!"

First Lieutenant James "Nick" Rowe
reviewed the reports that had been coming in about enemy activity near
the small outpost at Tan Phu in Vietnam. The situation wasn't
good, and Nick knew it. Tan Phu was one of two isolated outposts
in the Mekong Delta Region of South Vietnam.

The defensive force consisted of four
companies, about 380 local Vietnamese and Cambodians recruited for
service in the CIDG (Civilian Irregular Defense Group). The twelve
men of Special Forces Team A-23 worked with the CIDG and their
counterpart South Vietnamese Special Forces (LLDB) to secure the region
from the terrorists attacks of the Communist Viet Cong.

Not far from the camp lay the foreboding U
Minh Forest, a haven for the enemy into which the Special Forces Team
had yet to venture. The year was 1963, well before most Americans
had ever heard of Vietnam and two years in advance of the full-scale war
that would involve nearly three million American soldiers and cost more
than 58,000 lives. In the fall of that year there were fewer than
1,000 American Green Berets serving in Vietnam to advise the CIDG
in the defense of their country.

Twenty-five year old
Lieutenant Rowe believed in what he was doing in Vietnam, was committed
to the Special Forces motto to "Free the Oppressed". A
graduate of the US Military Academy at West Point, Class of 1960, he
also lived and led by the creed Duty, Honor, Country.

Nick looked up as an
imposing figure strolled across the small compound at Tan Phu.
Tall, strong, with piercing eyes and steel-gray hair, Captain Humbert
Roque Rocky Versace drew attention wherever he went. The
Special Forces Captain had graduated from West Point one year ahead of
Lieutenant Rowe, and had already served one full tour in Vietnam, then
extended his tour.

Years later a Marine who had
met Captain Versace in Vietnam said of him, "If you were going to
ask for a West Point cadet from central casting, he was
it."

Like
Lieutenant Rowe, Captain Versace believed in his mission. Though
he appeared to be a soldier without fear and was a powerful foe in
battle, he loved the Vietnamese people and had a captivating smile that
warmed the heart of children and civilians. His relationship to
these innocent victims of the brewing war in Southeast Asia was further
enhanced by the fact that Captain Versace was fluent in both French and
Vietnamese. Indeed, under other circumstances, Rocky might have
come to Vietnam to minister instead of to fight.

Raised in a strict Catholic
household (his mother wrote "The Fifteenth Pelican", a short
story that became the basis for The Flying Nun), Rocky was
planning to enter the ministry as a priest with the Maryknoll
Missions. His father was a career soldier and graduate of West
Point, so when Rocky received his own appointment to the Academy, he
opted to be a soldier first. He volunteered to serve in Vietnam,
and then upon arriving there, still found time to minister. In the
delta town of Camau where he was based, Rocky Versace built
dispensaries, procured tin sheeting to replace thatch roofs and arranged
for tons of bulgur wheat to feed family pigs. He even wrote to
schools back in the United States, encouraging them to send soccer balls
for the village playgrounds. At Christmas time in 1962 Rocky
voiced his convictions in a letter home stating:

"I am convinced
that your taxpayers' money is being put to a very worthy
cause--that of freeing the Vietnamese people from an organized
Communist threat aimed at the same nasty things all Communists
want--at denying this country and its wonderful people a chance
to better themselves."

In Camau Captain Versace
served as a MAAG intelligence advisor to the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN)
in the An Xuyen Province. On October 28, 1963 when he traveled to
Tan Phu on a liaison visit to exchange information, Rocky had only two
weeks remaining in his second tour, after which he planned to enter the
ministry and return to Vietnam on missions of mercy.

As he walked across the
small compound now, he carried important information after meeting with
the Thoi Binh district chief. Captain Versace had learned that a
small enemy force had moved into the nearby hamlet of Le Coeur,
eight kilometers from Tan Phu. This posed a very real danger that
the enemy could use their command post in the hamlet to launch attacks
on Tan Phu.

Captain Versace met with the
Team's commander, Captain Philip N. Arsenault to discuss the concerns
over the nearby enemy activity. It was decided that a quick strike
on Le Coeur should be commenced the next morning. The plan
would send out three companies of CIDG and local militia. Third Company
containing the members of the militia would be under command of
Vietnamese LLDB Lieutenant Lam Quang Tinh. They would hit the enemy command
post and secure Le Coeur, while the other two companies lay in wait between the
hamlet and the U Minh Forest to cut off any retreat.

"I'm going too,"
Captain Versace announced as the men of Detachment A-23 looked up in
surprise.

"Look, we are
undertaking this operation because of information obtained in my meeting
with the district chief," Versace responded. "That makes
this a joint operation with the militia, which makes it MY
responsibility to be involved."

Rocky Versace was the kind
of man who had firm convictions, and when he believed he was right,
there was no changing his mind. In the end, after all the
discussion, it was determined that Lieutenant Rowe, Sergeant First Class
Daniel Pitzer (the medic) and Captain Versace would accompany Lieutenant
Tinh and Third Company in the assault on the hamlet.

Captain Humbert Roque
Versace

October 29, 19630300 Hours

Lieutenant Tinh moved his Third Company of
militia out of the
perimeter at Tan Phu in the early morning darkness, and set a course for Le
Coeur. Three hours earlier the other two companies had left, planning
to skirt the hamlet and set up positions on the other side. When
Third Company hit the village, everyone expected the small enemy force there
to hightail it for the safety of the U Minh Forest.

As had been expected, when the strike force
reached Le Coeur, the enemy abandoned their command post. "We
had a good plan and a good bunch of troops and when we hit the hamlet on the
edge of the U Minh, the Viet Cong bugged and ran just as we thought they
would," Lieutenant Rowe wrote years later. Lieutenant Tinh and his militia entered the hamlet without resistance, finding
it deserted. For a time they swept the area for intelligence.
Lieutenant Rowe picked up a spent Mossin-Magant cartridge. Not until later
did it dawn on him that the presence of the Russian K-44 shell casing indicated
they were facing more than a small platoon of irregular Viet Cong.

Pleased with the mission's success, the
American advisors directed the companies to return to Tan Phu. "There
was not doubt we had surprised them," Rowe continued in his book Five
Years to Freedom. "We caught them completely unaware, but they
reacted in just the opposite way than we had anticipated. Instead of
falling into our ambush, they set us up for theirs." Instead of
retreating into the U Minh Forest, the Main Force 306th Viet Cong Battalion,
perhaps as many as 1,000 enemy soldiers, retreated in the opposite direction to
lay in wait.

While the ambushers of First Company
returned by a route similar to the one they had taken to get to their post
between the forest and Le Coeur, the 120-man CIDG company with the three
American Green Berets followed the canals back by a different route. By 10
A.M. they had moved about two kilometers down one of the myriad of canals when
they saw a line of black-clad Viet Cong trying to cut them off. They had
caught up to the retreating enemy forces from Le Coeur, but the enemy was no
longer retreating.

From a range of 900 meters, the Viet Cong
began firing their automatic weapons at the South Vietnamese soldiers and their
American advisors. At that range this was no great threat, for the allied
force was too distant for accuracy. What the enemy small arms and
automatic weapons fire did do, was pin down the allied force while they set up
mortars. At first, the mortars that peppered the landscape like hail, fell
harmlessly beyond the allied force, as the enemy gunners had not yet established
their range.

Suddenly a group of CIDG broke and ran for
the shelter of a bank near a rice paddy. They enemy had fixed the range to
that point, and "There was almost dead silence and I could almost picture
it in my mind...watching the VC range those (mortar) tubes," Rowe
recalled. "And then it came. There was one flight of about 12
rounds and it was almost a complete wipeout of our people who had run for that
bank."

The Americans and their CIDG force quickly
pulled back into a tree line and set up a perimeter.

And then the VC came, hitting the allied
force on three sides.

"I
never saw so many VC in my life," Lieutenant Rowe wrote. "They
must have had at least three platoons coming across that paddy and they just
kept coming. As long as our strikers had ammunition, it was like a turkey
shoot.

"Then they began to work us over
with 57s and 81 mortars and we were taking casualties pretty heavily. And
out there beckoning to us was that one big open rice paddy that wasn't being
defended and I thought 'what the hell, let's use it.' But then we realized
it was what they wanted us to do. They had it ambushed at two tree lines
on the other side...a classical three-sided attack with an ambushed escape
route.

"We dug in and tried to stop them
from overrunning us.

"At this moment two or our (allied)
planes passed nearby, a T-28 Caribou, and we thought we had it made but the
pilot of the T-28, who had more VC in his sights at that moment than he had ever
seen before, radioed that he couldn't engage without authorization from
Saigon...and he flew on.

"We had about 120 men and we were
dealing out heavy casualties to the Cong, doing the job we were in Vietnam to
do, and we weren't all that disturbed at first. But then we began to run
low on ammunition and we realized just how many damned VC were out there.

"I had an M1...and I was doing good
work with it across those paddies. I went through two bandoliers of ammo
and you had to hit something every time you fired in that mass of bodies coming
at us. We had Buddhist Cambods with tattoos on their chest that were
supposed to protect them from harm and those guys were walking around in our
perimeter like it was pay day in Tan Phu. Rounds were coming in all over
the place, mortars, 57s, small arms fire, and these guys were walking around
checking ammo, making status reports, laughing, and joking and stacking up
Charlie (enemy bodies) like cord wood 10 to 15 meters in front of our positions.

"They were bloodying Charly's (sic)
nose, something awful. They had never been in a shootout like this
before...and they were winning, and it felt good. And in the back of all
our minds was the thought that First Company, which had preceded us back to camp
after we had hit the hamlet, would be back to give us a hand."

From: Five Years to Freedom
by James N. Rowe

As the medic, SFC Pitzer was busy tending
to the wounded as enemy fire continued to rain on their position, unabated
despite the heavy losses incurred by the Viet Cong. For six hours the CIDG
force and the three Green Berets fought off wave after wave of enemy, confident
that if they could hold on long enough, First Company would arrive to
reinforce them.

Then came the word that First Company had
also been ambushed and wouldn't be coming. "We got cold lumps in
our stomachs," Lieutenant Rowe recalled. "We knew that
the game was up. We weren't going anywhere."

Captain Versace and Lieutenant Rowe,
realizing that the day was nearly spent but that the flood of enemy soldiers was
not, told their CIDG forces to withdraw while the three Americans covered
them. The order didn't have to be issued twice. What had earlier
appeared to be a big victory for the CIDG force, had degenerated into a
potential massacre. "Our troops came past us at Mach 3 and
accelerating," Rowe remembered.

The Green Berets stayed in their position
along the canal to cover the withdrawal, hoping then to leap-frog back to Tan
Phu. Suddenly, out of the trees, an enemy assault squad swarmed the
canal.

"Dan (Pitzer) caught the first
bunch with the M79 (grenade launcher). When the first guy got it in the
chest, he all but disappeared and the sight stopped the (enemy) squad
cold. They had never seen the M79 before and the shock of the weapon's
power gave us time to get out of there.

"I found our guys in a big ditch
and everyone had thrown away their weapons and were ready to surrender.
One of the NVSF that we called Pee Hole Bandit (Sgt. Trung) was ready to throw
himself on a grenade he had ready.

"We got them up and into a cane
field, moving them out, pushing them, covering for them...then the sound of a
BAR--there isn't another sound like it in the world--came crashing in on
us. Rocky went down with three rounds in the leg.

The withdrawal ordered by Versace and Rowe
had turned into a disorganized melee, CIDG forces running in all directions in
any hope of getting away from there. SFT Pitzer realized that the allied
force was now split up, decimated, and that all hope was gone. He dropped
his grenade launcher, maps and other gear and buried them in the mud, planning
to hit the canal and try and swim out of there. That was when he heard
Captain Versace yell that he had been hit. "I hesitated," he
recalled years later in an interview for LOOK magazine. "I did
not want to be captured, but I could not run off on the Captain. Just as I
reached him, something exploded--a mortar round or a concussion grenade--and I
was knocked down, shrapnel in my right shoulder.

"I looked up, and there was a VC with
an automatic weapon pointed at me."

Nearby, Rocky Versace struggled against the
pain of the three BAR rounds in his leg. An enemy grenade exploded nearby
and would have caught him full force had not his leg folded beneath him.
The blast caught Lieutenant Rowe in the face and chest as he stepped over to aid
the Captain.

"I went over backwards," Rowe
wrote, "and I thought I was dead. There was just one big ringing
noise and I couldn't see and couldn't hear and everything was numb. No
pain. Just numbness. I tried to get up and the whole world did a 360
and I went down on my knees to get straight. Rocky put his arms around my
neck and I tried to drag him off the trail so we could play dead until they went
past us.

"You could hear them screaming and
yelling and trailing (sic) like crazy. We broke reeds back across our
trail. Rock wanted to charge out with the seven rounds he had left in his carbine
and get that many more shots off at the VC. That was all he could think
of.

"I showed him that his wounds were
pumping like a fire hydrant and that he would bleed to death before he could
pull the trigger if he didn't let me get a bandage on him. I got the first
compress on his leg and was starting to put the second one on...when all of a
sudden the reeds broke open and I heard someone yelling:

'Do tay len!'
Hands up!

In the distance
lay the shrouded darkness of the U Minh Forest...
For the first time, American soldiers would be entering its foreboding
jungles.....